


Make It Work (The Runyonland Music Remix)

by sanguinity



Category: Elementary (TV)
Genre: F/M, Remix
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-14
Updated: 2017-01-14
Packaged: 2018-08-24 06:09:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,498
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8360413
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sanguinity/pseuds/sanguinity
Summary: 2017 was coming at them like a freight train, full of terrifying unknowns that Paige wasn’t sure she had the courage to meet. But somehow, she and Tommy would make it work.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [A Little Night Music](https://archiveofourown.org/works/8250392) by [PhoenixFalls](https://archiveofourown.org/users/PhoenixFalls/pseuds/PhoenixFalls). 



> Thanks to phoenixfalls for beta, and sans_patronymic for NYC-pick!

“They need you back at the piano,” Paige scolded Tommy when he finally broke off the kiss. Marcus’ baritone, magnified by the high ceilings of the brownstone, rang clear through the cacophony in the next room, but even his valiant efforts weren’t enough to anchor the assembly to a single key.

“If they can’t struggle through Auld Lang Syne on their own, they’re a sorrier lot than I thought,” Tommy groused, unconcerned about his duties as the evening’s _ad hoc_ pianist. He stroked her overheated cheek with the backs of his fingers. He had been drinking steadily all evening, at first growing happier and looser, but an hour ago he had crossed over into deeply, passionately earnest. “Kiss the person you hope to spend the rest of the year with,” he murmured, his eyes brimming over with the promises she refused to let him make.

2017 was coming at them like a freight train, full of terrifying unknowns that she wasn’t sure she had the courage to meet. Too, she knew how the job ate up marriages. Even with the very best of will, Tommy might not be able to keep the promises he wanted to make, and she wasn’t about to let her heart be broken by that, not when everything else was unravelling around her. Yet she could still join him in the hope that 2017 would be kind enough to let them spend it together. “Yes,” she said, and reached up to kiss him again. She wanted very much to still be with him this time next year.

Tommy fervently gathered her up—even with the alcohol, he was surer on his feet than she was—and she let herself give over to his kiss. _More I cannot wish you_ , she heard, although the party was still slogging away at Auld Lang Syne.

“Is that an accordion?” she asked, when Tommy finally set her back down again.

He grinned. “Fifty says it’s Joan.”

She squinted at him. She would have guessed Holmes.

“Hey, no inside information here,” he attempted to reassure her. “I had no idea there was an accordion in the building, or that either of them played it.”

It was probably true—Tommy couldn’t sell a lie to save his life—but Paige wasn’t born yesterday, either. “No bet,” she said, sure he knew _something._

And sure enough, when she followed the sound into the next room, Tommy following along behind her by the hand, it was Joan who stood halfway up the staircase with the squeeze-box, stalwartly accompanying Marcus below as he soldiered through the last verses of Auld Lang Syne. Lin stood nearby, looking surprisingly wistful.

Paige turned an accusing look on Tommy. “No inside information...?”

“I swear I didn’t know,” he said, and drew her into a shuffling slow-dance to the accordion’s accompaniment. “But I thought one as likely as the other. People always bet it’s Holmes, though. They only ever see her next to him, see, so they end up thinking she’s the boring one. I learned my lesson the hard way.”

“Oh...?” Paige prompted with a grin, scenting a story where Tommy had gotten his ass handed to him by his consultant.

He laughed. “Oh, no, it’s not gonna be _that_ easy. I’ll need to be substantially drunker than this to tell that story.” He nuzzled into her hair. “Whaddaya say we get out of here?”

“Yes, let’s,” she agreed, but they kept swaying until the final, wheezing exhale of Joan’s accordion. And then they swayed just a little while longer, because it was New Year’s and there was no reason not to.

Out on the stoop, Paige paused at the top of the steps to breathe in the clean, fresh, cold air. “Such a beautiful night,” she said, watching the celebratory bustle in the street. She could hear the muffled booms and thuds of the pyrotechnics show in Times Square, and sirens somewhere else. That was one thing she would never miss about the job: spending the holidays in uniform, trying to keep her fellow New Yorkers from killing their neighbors. “Let’s walk a little?”

Tommy surveyed the pavement suspiciously, despite the fact that it was mostly clear of snow. Paige was about to rebuke him for overprotectiveness—she didn’t want to waste a good day on fear of a little ice—when he visibly reined himself in. “Sure,” he agreed, and put an arm around her waist. “Getting a cab tonight’ll be a pain in the ass anyway.”

They walked together, Paige leaning into Tommy’s warmth while he hummed to himself. It was one of the songs from early in the evening, the one about the night belonging _to the cop, and the janitor with a mop_. Marcus had done a beautiful job with it, the room going quiet as he sang. The song wasn’t wrong: Paige had enjoyed the otherworldly quiet of the night shift, back when she was twenty-five and walked a patrol. The bookshop tended to be quiet and desolate, too, but that was a very different kind of feeling, less like a secret and more like being forgotten. Nowadays, most of her business was mail-order through the big distributors, a penny a book plus shipping, and most of her workplace conversations were with the clerks at the shipping store.

She’d have to give up the bookstore soon, too.

Tommy must have caught her change of mood, because he stopped humming and sang full voice instead, hamming it up to make her laugh. His voice was nothing to write home about, but Tommy used what he had to good advantage, and that was Tommy all over. “ _—and you’re the on-ly doll I ev-er wanted to share it with me…!”_ he finished, spinning out into a grand, sweeping gesture that made her giggle.

“Oh, come on now, I know that’s not true,” she teased.

“Eh. It’s true enough,” he shrugged, tucking her back against his side again. His smile turned wistful. “I mean, Hannah and I were never gonna walk a beat together, but when she graduated the Academy...”

As a topic, it threatened its own kind of melancholy: Hannah had been angry and unforgiving at Christmas, certain her father was obstructing her promotion to sergeant. Tommy had taken it hard. Paige squeezed his hand, where it was tucked around her waist. “She’ll come around.”

The look Tommy gave her clearly expressed his doubt. “Not unless she makes sergeant, and soon, _and_ I put in a good word to get her there.”

Paige grimaced, because that would be as good as never. The girl had it in her to make sergeant, of course, but if one put his two loose-cannon consultants aside, Tommy was rigorously by-the-books. He might give Hannah advice, mentor her, but he’d never pull strings for her, not unless she was in real trouble.

“Sooooo...” Paige offered, as a distraction, “Lin and Marcus?”

He frowned at her. “Lin and Marcus what?”

“Oh, c’mon, you saw them tonight. The only time she smiled was when she was talking to him.”

Tommy snorted. “That’s a non-starter.”

“Why? Marcus seems to like her well enough.”

“He was making nice, for Joan’s sake. Lin runs a floating poker game—or used to, some questions I don't ask—and Bell was the lead detective after it got hit with an armed robbery. She pled out, probation and Gam-Anon. There’s nothing happening there.”

“Ah,” Paige said.

Two steps later, Tommy came to an exasperated stop. “Don’t do this, Paige. I thought we were all done with this.”

“I’m not doing anything,” she denied.

“Look. I’ve told you this. It isn’t a technicality that your record’s clean and theirs aren’t. The kind of money Lin had floating around that table, it’s no surprise to anyone that some kid wound up dead. _You_ never did anything that even came close to getting someone killed, and the D.A. knew that when she preferred her charges. _This,_ ” he said, emphatically gesturing between them, “ _this_ isn’t based on a technicality. ”

“I _know_ that,” she said, although it wasn’t as simple as he was making it out to be. The fraternization rules were about influences, about officers lying down with dogs and getting up with fleas, and if Paige was as clean as all that, she’d still be on the Force.

He drew in a frustrated breath. “And we were having such a good night, too.”

“We could still be having a good night, Tommy,” she said, pushing past him. “Just drop it, let’s not waste one of the good days on this.”

“Well, we’re sure as hell not gonna spend a bad day on it.”

She stopped and turned to look at him. He’d never expressed resentment of her bad days before. She had known he would someday reach his limit—her support group was heavy with women whose partners had abandoned them—but as recently as her last relapse, he’d been generous, kind, reassuring… She knew no one could keep that up forever, she _knew_ that, but she was still shocked to the core that Tommy had thrown a low blow so soon. “That’s not fair.”

“No, it’s not. None of it is. But frankly, if it was fair, we’d probably all be a lot worse off than we are.” He cracked a crooked smile. “Believe me, I’m the very last one to complain about the world not being fair.”

She couldn’t join him in his humor. “I’m doing the best I can, Tommy. I swear to you, I am doing the _very_ goddamn best I can.” She was doing her best all the goddamn time, and she felt brittle from the effort.

“I know, sweetheart,” he said, stepping in to put his arms around her. “God, believe me, I know. But that’s what I’m objecting to. The good days don’t have to be perfect. Even if you could do perfect—and you shouldn’t have to, you’ve got enough on your plate as it is—I _can’t._ The good days, they’ve gotta be what they are.”

She searched his face. There was nothing there but earnest frustration.

He was right that the good days couldn’t be perfect, but what he was proposing was terrifying. Men said they wanted the real you, the ugly that went along with the good, but when you let them see that ugly, they up and left.

But damn it, it was _Tommy._ Tommy, who always did the right thing, no matter what it cost him. And that was a whole different kind of terrifying: that he’d keep doing the right thing, come hell or high water, until he finally collapsed under its weight and ended up hating someone for it. Hating her or hating himself, and she wasn’t sure which would hurt worse.

But there was no way out of this mess except to not do it at all, and neither of them wanted that, either.

She nodded grimly. “All right.” She tucked her hands deep into his coat pockets, and tried not to show how vulnerable she felt.

He wrapped her up in his arms, nestling his face against her stocking cap. “We’ll figure it out, Paige, I swear. Just let me carry my own weight. Stop protecting me, all right?”

“I was a _cop,_ Tommy. Protect and serve.”

“Well, then maybe you could let me have a turn sometimes. I’m a cop, too, you know.”

She laughed at that, bitter and sad, and he squeezed her tight. 

After a while, he said, “I don’t know about you, but I’m getting cold.”

“You should have worn a hat,” she scolded him, and pulled back to look at him. He looked rueful, but maybe a little hopeful, too. She took his arm to walk with him again. “I told you to wear a hat.”

“And that’s you protecting me again,” he warned, but his eyes crinkled. “We just talked about this, you know.”

“Well, don’t expect me to wait hand and foot on you when you come down sick,” she chided him, and he grinned.

They walked quietly after that, occasionally offering odds on whether the igniter of any particular bottle rocket would end up cited before the end of the night. Sometimes one of them would take the other up on the bet, if their odds differed enough. They'd check the police blotter together in the morning.

“You know, I’ve been thinking about Italy,” Tommy said, three blocks later. “San Gimignano.” He said it smoothly, like he’d spent some time practicing the name since she’d first told him about it.

She smiled. He had so casually offered to go to Tuscany with her, back when he’d thought they had the usual kind of future in front of them. “Yeah,” she said quietly. “I would have liked that.”

“We could, if you still wanted. No, no, hear me out. I have a bad habit of cashing out my vacation, but I don’t want to repeat with you the same mistakes I made with Cheryl. I’d be happy to take my PTO here, just spending it with you. But if you wanted...” He shrugged diffidently, as if he didn’t much care about what he was proposing, but Paige knew better. “We could take our time going over. Do a, whaddaya call it, a repositioning cruise, so the boat’s doing all the work, and it doesn’t matter so much if any particular day is a bad one. Same thing once we’re there—get ourselves a villa, and just… soak it in. Enjoy the good days as they come. Ride out the bad ones with some world-class gelato.”

She cracked a smile at the picture. “Sounds better than Ben and Jerry’s in the cold at home.” Tuscany might not be the place: she wasn’t sure she would be comfortable being that far from her doctor, and they both might be more relaxed somewhere Tommy knew the language. And yet there was still something surprisingly attractive about the idea. “A medieval city might not be the most manageable. All those cobbles and stairs.”

“Well, no reason it has to be Tuscany,” he agreed, thinking along the same lines she was. “I’m sure you could come up with somewhere, though. I know you’ve got a whole shop-full of travel books to choose from.”

She hadn’t thought Tommy had been paying particular attention, but he’d obviously caught that she spent a good portion of her dead time in the shop leafing through the coffee-table photo-essays of one country or another.

“Thing is,” he continued, “if you wanted to, we could make it work.”

She thought about that. About Tuscany, or Spain. Or even London, someplace thoroughly modern, where Tommy spoke the language. Or maybe some ancient hamlet in the English countryside. Taking it slow, with no particular pressure that any given day had to be a good one.

“You’re right,” she said, squeezing his hand, where it covered hers in the crook of his elbow. “We probably could make it work.”

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [shoot the sunshine into my veins (Make It Work Remix)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/8457187) by [everybodylies](https://archiveofourown.org/users/everybodylies/pseuds/everybodylies)




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